Denmark wants to push through Chat Control (netzpolitik.org)

Denmark, now holding the EU Council presidency, has relaunched a push for a mandatory "chat control" regulation that would require internet services to scan users’ communications for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) — including by client-side scanning (CSS) of end‑to‑end encrypted traffic — and report suspected content to authorities. The Danish presidency has undone softer proposals that would have made scanning voluntary or excluded encrypted channels, set a fast timetable (working‑group reconvenes 9 Oct; ministers meet 14 Oct), and is pressing for a Council position despite deep splits: roughly ten states back the mandatory approach, five oppose it, and Germany is seen as the potential swing vote. The EU Commission and Presidency acknowledge there is no error‑free detection technology and the Commission has missed a statutory report meant to justify proportionality. For the AI/ML community this is consequential: it would force providers to deploy automated detection models at scale on personal devices or decrypted streams, amplifying tradeoffs between detection sensitivity, false positives, privacy and security. Experts warn of “unacceptably high” false‑alarm rates that could inundate investigators and wrongly flag innocents; adversarial actors can evade signature or classifier‑based systems; and CSS raises new attack surfaces (exposing models, keys, or heuristics on client devices). The debate also implicates model explainability, robustness, dataset bias, legal risk, and the future of end‑to‑end encryption — all areas where ML research, engineering and responsible disclosure practices will be tested if the proposal proceeds.